


Confessions of Clocks

by rainbowballz



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe, Angst, Blind Character, F/F, Religious Conflict, Religious Content, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 15:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4672586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowballz/pseuds/rainbowballz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate sank into Max’s warmth so happily, so easily, that it had to be a sin. / A crisis of faith is forging a path for Kate that will lead her away from Max, whose time manipulating abilities are costing her more than she could have foreseen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confessions of Clocks

**Author's Note:**

> Wherein Max has her rewind powers, but there is no storm and no one is missing or dead. The consequences of her gift are different in this universe. I do not own Life is Strange, I only write this because I’m sad and gay. This is a WIP.
> 
> Triggers: As of right now, only heavy religious themes are present.

_“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.”_

**_Genesis 6:5-6_ **

* * *

  _\- Present -_

“LORD in heaven, please forgive me. I am desperate for your guidance.”

Kate’s breath warmed the whisper she chanted against the back of her thumbs. Her knees felt deeply purple with bruises and the center of both palms were depressed in the shape of a cross from the rosary she clasped like a buoy between her hands. Hematite beads draped over bleached knuckles and puddled on the edge of the bed.

She prayed for hours.

Kate did not keep track of the time by the clock on her desk but by the familiar ache in her back from kneeling; when the pain ebbed to numbness she knew that morning had broken outside but she did not open her eyes to look. Praying was the answer for all things in the home she grew up in, from giving thanks to receiving punishment. The language of repentance was one she was fluent in. It moved through her like a flood and she became lost in the current.

“I beg for your forgiveness. Please cleanse me with your healing hand, Lord. My spirit is weak. My heart is heavy. Only you can make me clean again. Only you can save me.”

In the beginning, humans lived for hundreds of years. Adam was nearly a thousand before he died. How did he carry his guilt that long? Kate had barely survived the past few months without praying for several hours a day, trying to find the answer that would make her pure again. Did Adam pray fervently for forgiveness? Did he ever forgive himself?

In the corner of the dorm, Alice nibbled at the silver dropper of her water dispenser. The rabbit’s teeth clicking against the metal interrupted Kate mid-sentence and her bleary eyes opened slowly like she had been stuck in a trance. She blinked until the room came into focus and saw that morning had trickled between the blinds and painted the walls the yellow of canary feathers. She finally looked at the clock. It was nearly eight. A nightmare that smelled like brimstone startled her awake at four.

Kate eased off of her knees with a wince and sat on the edge of the mattress. Carefully uncurling her clasped hands, she stared at the red hollow created by the crucifix of her rosary. Imbedded in her flesh was the body of Christ.

Her heart felt steady for the first time in days. She released a long sigh, head bowed forward. She knew God could forgive all things if she only asked with a determined heart. As long as her promise to do better was sincere, there was nothing she could do that would make God turn his back on her. Nothing comforted Kate the way the boundless love of her God did.

The long prayer session had made her decision that much more concrete. Temptation could not threaten her eternal soul if she was a hundred miles away. Looking around her room, Kate felt estranged amongst her own belongings; the shirts peeking out from the half open closet seemed foreign, and the illustrations she studied on the walls must have been drawn by someone else. The wedge between who she was and who she so desperately wanted to be was a canyon to cross, and the person she was currently was not a person at all but a place like limbo, where unbaptized babies go when they die.

Whatever vague sense of peace she had found in her prayers began to quickly slip through her fingers. Dread filled up the spaces.

No, she thought firmly, and tightened her hands together again, as if that would keep her serenity from falling away from her. This was the right thing to do. Her parents were so proud of her decision - surprised at the sudden change of heart, certainly, but supportive. And God could not ask for a more dedicated servant, one willing to throw it all away in order to make up for her sins.

Blackwell Academy was not home anymore, anyway. It had nearly destroyed her in more ways than one.

Kate turned her head to stare at the open laptop on her desk, dark with sleep. She looked at her cellphone sitting beside it that blinked blue in the dawn, signaling an unread message (she knew without checking who it was from); her sketchbooks, her camera, her pencils and paintbrushes, her pet. Trying to imagine her life without all of these earthly possessions intimidated her, though she supposed that in itself was half the battle.

One of the first Biblical stories she had been taught as a child came to life in her mind at the thought, lighting up on the backdrop of her eyelids like an old film rolling in the dark. She saw Noah with his calloused hands and aching legs building the ark. She saw the animals filing in pairs after his family, and she saw the earth fill with water. Noah watched everything and everyone he had ever known drown. Kate wondered if he wept every one of those forty nights, and if so, what for?

What would she bring on her ark?

With a soft, cruel laugh, Kate shook her head. This stuff, these things, she knew she could live without. It would be an adjustment but Kate had adjusted to worse. The true battle was not in cutting the strings of dependence that she had tied to the items she owned, but it would lie in the untangling of the many knots she had tucked around the person who had taken her heart.

She flinched as if she were struck. Bowing her head again, she pressed her bound hands to her forehead and began to rock with another prayer. “Only you have my heart, Lord, please forgive me.”

A knock at the door silenced her again but it did not surprise her. Kate knew she would come, eventually. She did not want her to see her like this, with dark crescents punched under her eyes and in just her pajamas, but Kate needed to see her. She needed to say goodbye.

Kate held her breath with a quick prayer. Give me strength, she begged, before calling out, “Come in.”

The door opened and Max appeared in the threshold. Her choppy brown hair was still damp and dark from a recent shower and the smell of her shampoo wafted into the dorm. Kate started breathing through her mouth to avoid it. Max’s nervous fingers plucked at the button of her cardigan until it came undone, revealing a flock of white birds taking flight across the pink canvas of the t-shirt underneath. Something akin to a smile (though it was probably more related to a wince) struggled on Max’s mouth as she took a tentative step inside. “Hey,” she said, voice lost in her throat. She cleared it with a suppressed cough as she slowly closed the door behind her. “Sorry if I woke you up with my text.”

“I was already awake.” Kate did not attempt to smile at her. Pushing herself further on the bed, she brought her knees to her chest and folded her arms around them. She focused on Alice in the corner, meeting her blank black eyes peering back through the bars of the cage. The air felt charged like a storm was creeping over the horizon to wash them out.

She wondered if Noah covered his ears when he heard the thunder of the flood to come.

Max shifted awkwardly from foot to foot near the door for a few moments in silence except this time there is nothing cute or endearing about it - it was painful to watch, like Max had to fight just to exist in the same space as Kate. Max’s mouth opened but closed again with no words. Finally, she made her way to the bed with all the jerking grace of the Tin Man and perched on the very edge. The small space between them might as well have been a crater miles wide.

“Is it true?” Max asked, head turned toward Kate but angled down at the shoulder and her chipped blue eyes were on her hand resting limply on the bed. They both watched Max’s fingers slowly curl into a fist. “You’re leaving Blackwell?”

Kate had always liked how forward Max was. Why waste time, especially now, when time didn’t even work in the way Kate had known to be true? Still, Kate struggled to answer just as directly, prying her tongue from the roof of her mouth to form the words. “Being here is not good for me, Max,” she said, slowly releasing the rosary from her grip and watching the beads trail down the slope of her thighs, little red stones dripping like crystallized blood. From her peripherals Kate watched Max’s lips press into a tight line.

“So you’re just going to run off and become a nun, then?”

Kate, genuinely surprised by the malice lacing Max’s words, glanced up, but Max refused to look at her.  A muscle flexed in Max’s cheek like it was taking every ounce of her strength to keep herself from screaming.

“You don’t just ‘become a nun’, Max. You don’t just walk into a nunnery, put on a habit and start calling yourself Sister -”

“Kate.”

The tone was so sharp that Kate flinched. She pulled her knees closer.

“Kate,” Max repeated, her tone soft and apologetic. “You know what I mean.”

A thick, choking knot formed at the base of Kate’s throat. Her eyes seared with tears she denied the privilege of falling. “Max.” Kate barely managed the name and her next breath stuttered through her so hard her shoulders started to shake. She had all the right words in her head, cradled at the back of her tongue, but she could not get them to come out. They rotted in her mouth with a taste that made her gag.

Max slid next to Kate’s shaking body and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Kate sank into Max’s warmth so happily, so easily, that it had to be a sin.

She was so weak. She clung to Max just like the people of Noah’s time likely held onto each other while they drowned. They were sinners. God was trying to cleanse the earth. People were not supposed to feel bad for them.

Kate did. Kate would have been one of them. Noah would have watched her from the safety of his ark as the water swallowed her up. He would not have tried to save her.

The sound of Max’s sudden, rapid breathing shushed Kate’s racing thoughts. When she pulled back to look at her, Max’s lower lip was wedged so tightly between her teeth the skin was white. An overwhelming instinct almost made Kate lift her head and pry the punished lip free with her thumb.

Almost.

Kate knew. She recoiled from Max’s touch as if she had been burned. “What did you do?” The edge of her headboard cut into her back, a straight vicious line across her spine. “What did you rewind, Max?” Her own blood in her ears sounded too much like the ocean crashing unmercifully against the shore.

Time crawled to stop and Max looked at Kate in slow motion. “I kissed you,” Max said, and bit her lip again, tasting a memory that happened but didn’t happen.

“Get out.” Kate couldn’t catch her breath and the words came out in a tight whisper.

“You kissed me back.”

“Get out!”

Max stood so quickly her knees cracked with two loud pops. “It’s happening more often and it lasts longer. It used to be like blinking, short moments of blackness. Now it’s minutes. A half an hour.” Her eyes are hard when they look at Kate. When they first met, Kate had found Max’s stare to be kind and probing but never uncomfortable, but in that moment she felt as if Max was looking right through her skin and muscle and bone.

Kate pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes so hard she saw spots. She was already begging for forgiveness in her mind for something she hadn’t done, not really - not in this timeline, the real one. This one was the real one, right? Did God think in those terms? Did she have to repent for things that had been done but undone? Kate had to think of Max’s ability as a restart button, an eraser on a chalkboard, to resolve her of any wrong doing. She had to, or she had to carry the sins of Kates she didn’t know.

The flood was Old Testament. The flood was God’s restart.

Max made Kate’s brain and heart and soul hurt all at the same time.

“One day - and soon, Kate- it’ll all go away. I’ll wait and wait for it to come back and it won’t. And I’ll be here by myself. In the dark.” Max’s voice wavered, and Kate wanted to launch across the bed and hold onto her, she wanted to whisper promises and beautiful words and anything that would make Max stop crying, that would keep her from crying ever again.

An old echo reverberated in her mind, words her father had spoken to her when she was small, when she cried Christmas morning after opening a study Bible instead of the doll she had asked for. “Anything you want more than God, Kate, is the Devil tempting you with evil.”

Max and evil could not exist in the same sentence, let alone the same space. But then why was God punishing her so? Max might not have faith but there were far more deserving people of the fate she had been given.  It wasn’t fair.

She thought of the story of Job, a faithful man who had everyone he loved taken from him, all of his wealth obliterated, not even left with his good health - and for what? Because of a bet with the Devil?

Kate’s head began to pound. She was straying from the good book, posing questions that she had no right to ask. Why do the righteous suffer? The answer doesn’t matter. God was all knowing, all powerful, his word was final and she was in no position to challenge him, a good servant of God obeys and prays and repents, obeys and prays and repents -

“I’m going blind, Kate.” Max crossed her arms and held onto herself as if she would unravel like a yarn doll. “And you’re just going to leave.”

Kate shook her head and tore her eyes away from Max because looking at her hurt too much. She gathered the rosary in her hands again and strangled the beads. “I’m sorry.” She said the words like they were the only ones she knew.  The language of repentance seemed to be her primary one lately.

Something flickered in Kate’s peripherals. Max’s hand, switching impossibly from one position to another like a video game glitch. Kate knew. She did not dare meet Max’s eyes. “What did you rewind?” What she is really asking is what sin does she have to be forgiven for this time?

“I needed to see your face when I said it,” was Max’s cryptic reply. And then the door shut behind her and Kate was left with just the smell of her shampoo and the unnerving sensation that there existed more than one Kate in the same room.

She scrambled off the side of the bed and slammed her knees to the floor with unforgiving force. The shock rippled through her aching spine as she hunched over the edge of the mattress with her hands clasped tightly to her forehead. “Lord in heaven, please forgive me. I am desperate for your guidance.”

The words were recited. Rehearsed. She said them robotically, automatically, without feeling. She did not think about chasing Max down the corridor. She did not think about kissing Max’s failing eyes or her pretty mouth. Instead she thought of the world covered in water. She thought of a single dove with an olive branch in its beak.

**  
  
  
**


End file.
